Well, it is done. The results of my poll suggested that most of you like it, and I certainly do. So purple_pen is no more, and strange_complex has taken her place.

It felt a bit weird immediately after I'd done it. I was expecting it to maybe take a couple of hours to go through, but as soon as I'd paid up and returned to LJ, there it was - my username of seven years had unceremoniously vanished from its old home in the menu bar at the top of the screen, and some new name had appeared to take its place. It was hard not to feel deleted, kicked out and body-snatched for a moment, there. But I think I've pretty much got the hang of it already. It's like a brave new world. With, um, exactly the same stuff in it.

You, gentle reader, should be largely unaffected. All my friends contacts are exactly the same, and even if you forget my new username and type in <lj user=purple_pen> by accident, it will display as strange_complex. I think you should also find that every comment I've ever made, or every reference you have ever made to me in the past, has also been changed to show strange_complex as the username. So all you have to do is remember that that is the same person who used to be known as purple_pen.

Now I am off to round off the process by replacing my journal header, figuring out how all this has affected my OpenID (the official word is that it's anyone's guess), and also seeing whether LJArchive will be affected. Have a strange and complex morning!

I just went round for ages making sure I kept an eye out for possible names. I've literally been looking for years, so it isn't a very efficient way of doing it. But every time I came across an ancient female intellectual, or heard an isolated phrase which I liked the sound of, I rolled it around in my mind as a possible LJ name, until I hit on one that a) I liked and b) was free.

So, in other words, I've not got anything very helpful to say to someone else looking for a new name! I will come over and add what comments I can to your own post on the subject in a moment, though, when I've finished answering comments here.

Greetings! Actually, it hadn't occurred to me before that my new name works in a sort of pseudo-firstname-last-name format. The old one really didn't, not least because the second element in it was (part of) my first name. But now I can do things like go round calling my family The Complexities and so forth! Cool.

I'm glad to see that your regeneration has been completed successfully - and hopefully your adventures through across the width, breadth and history of the internet are going to remain just as interesting!